Contourlet-CNN for SAR Image Despeckling

A multiscale and multidirectional network named the Contourlet convolutional neural network (CCNN) is proposed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image despeckling. SAR image resolution is not higher than that of optical images. If the network depth is increased blindly, the SAR image detail information flow will become quite weak, resulting in severe vanishing/exploding gradients. In this paper, a multiscale and multidirectional convolutional neural network is constructed, in which a single-stream structure of convolutional layers is replaced with a multiple-stream structure to extract image features with multidirectional and multiscale properties, thus significantly improving the despeckling performance. With the help of the Contourlet, the CCNN is designed with multiple independent subnetworks to respectively capture abstract features of an image in a certain frequency and direction band. The CCNN can increase the number of convolutional layers by increasing the number of subnetworks, which makes the CCNN not only have enough convolutional layers to capture the SAR image features, but also overcome the problem of vanishing/exploding gradients caused by deepening the networks. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations of synthetic and real SAR images show the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art speckle reduction method.